Tag: under the fedora

Today is election day or if you are in a state with early voting the last day to make your decision. I’m wondering how many people in early voting states waited till the last-minute because they hadn’t made up their minds or if they like me, just didn’t bother going early.

One of the things that I was going to use to judge how the election was going to go was the body language of the MSM, if they were down yesterday I figured Trump had it, if they were up I figured Clinton had the edge. The 2nd Comey letter threw that off, it gave the MSM reason for optimism independent of the current trends so it totally messed up my calculations.

Speaking of Comey am I the only one seeing the irony that within 48 hours of the FBI claiming they reviewed a half million emails in the week the Justice Department said it would need 5 years to deliver Hillary emails to a judge who has called for them for months?

The Polls have been all over this year and it’s reached the point that I don’t know what to believe, the revelations that I saw from Wikileaks about polling didn’t help either but they did justify some of what I was saying four years about oversampling.

One of the big canards of this election has been that a different candidate, would have beaten Hillary easily. I disagree, with the exception of the Cruz or Rubio which would have been a problem for the left as the first latino candidate, I think that any standard republican would have been defined by the media the same way that Romney was. Furthermore they would not have had the audience that stretches beyond the political geeks like myself to bypass said MSM to get out their message.

I have a rule that I generally don’t bother with revelations that come with 72 hours or less to go, I figure such stuff, while thanks to social media can make a splash, doesn’t give sufficient time to evaluate what is said. So some of the latest stuff I’ve seen lately, just doesn’t go.

One of the most positive side effect of this election is distrust of the MSM has extended beyond the conservative base to the point where average people finally realize they are being played regularly. I think it’s fitting that at last the American people are learning to dislike and distrust the media in the same way that the media dislikes and distrusts them. The willingness of print, TV and electronic media (facebook, google, twitter) to unmask themselves and pay the long term price for doing so for the sake of Hillary is really quite amazing.

On Jake Tapper’s show yesterday one of the topics that was really interesting was the discussion on the Senate. The CW since 2014 was that the Democrats would take the body because the GOP did so well in the big red wave of 2016 but you could see that the folks there were not confident that this would be the case. If the GOP holds it will be almost as a big a story as a Trump win would be, particularly given the layout for the Senate races of 2018.

I find that regardless of the outcome this election will impose difficult responsibilities on me as a conservative Catholic. If Hillary wins I will have to endure with patience the persecution she heaps upon me and my fellow Catholics while at the same time resisting and speaking out against said persecution and standing for Christ during it. On the other hand if Mr. Trump wins my responsibility becomes to hold him and his administration’s feet to the fire to make sure, first of all, that he keeps the promises made in the name of life and freedom of religion to conservatives while at the same time opposing him if he attempts to drift into liberalism. I suspect the Trump responsibilities will be more difficult to do while the Clinton ones will be more difficult to bear.

Finally we are about to find out what kind of government we deserve, Do we deserve the pains of Obamacare? The failures of foreign policy, the victory of ISIS, Russia et/al the rejection of the rule of law and the disintegration of our trust in government? I’d like to think we deserve better but the people by their vote and by their acceptance of irregularities used to influence it will be the final factor that decides what we deserve.

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One of the big signs that the worm as turned in this election is the panic and depression on the faces of members of the MSM. I haven’t seen anything like it since the elections of 2010 first of Scott Brown and then the big red wave. While I think the defeat of Hillary is vital for the country I think most conservatives will get much more satisfaction from their discomfort then Trump’s win, if it happens.

The thing that I think is most discouraging to the press has been trump’s unwillingness to make a vital error and (to this point anyways) to stay on message during this week. This is in stark contrast to the Hillary campaign at this point. That’s a real sign of panic and nothing is more contagious or deadly to any enterprise.

While I think the cumulative effect of the wikileaks and Project Veritas helped move the polls I think the real advantage has been to illustrate the tactics of the left so that the normal counters that the left would use to counter his news, making them completely ineffective. That being said I’m shocked that as of this writing there hasn’t been one last November Surprise coordinated by the MSM and the Clintons. I don’t think waiting till Sunday night is a good idea, if they have something to play it’s got to be now.

My wife has been on a “Hallelujah” kick lately and if you go to YouTube you will find all kinds of version of that song from Susan Boyle

To Pentatonix

to the original songwriter Leonard Cohen.

It’s a good song but the more I think about it the reason I think it has caught on so well on a gut level, is man has an instinctive thirst for God and “Hallelujah” means “praise the Lord”.

One of my pet peeves is the argument by some that Slavery was not the driving force behind the Civil war. This can be disproved by looking at any newspapers from the 1840’s to the 1860’s but thanks to Prager U I don’t have to make that argument alone:

There were other factors but they meant little compared to slavery.

I’ve never stopped arguing that the pro-abortion argument is the same as the pro-slavery argument, if you don’t like Abortion/Slavery don’t have/own one. Or I’m personally opposed to Abortion/slavery but don’t want to forbid it or can’t see how to do it. Both of those arguments are equally morally shallow.

Stacy McCain continues to write about modern feminism and it’s Marxist/Wiccan roots but in the end a philosophy that rejects the normal rules of reproduction is doomed because nothing makes a philosophy obsolete then the failure of those who espouse it to breed.

One of the real pleasant surprises this week was walking into the doors at work at 10:30 PM with the score of game 7 of the Cubs vs the Indians 6-3 and discovering that the game wasn’t over when my first break came around at 12:30 AM allowing me to listen to the last 1/2 inning that proved to be just as exciting as the rest of the game. While at least one baseball fan in my family disagrees on the greatness of the game due to some really poor decisions by the Cubs’ manager I think that the greatness of the game was not lessened by the mistakes. Baseball like all sports is entertainment and I haven’t been so entertained by a game 7 in decades.

Speaking of pleasant surprises this week’s Big Bang Theory was excellent and entertaining. You would think that after 10 years the ideas would be running thin but the quality has kept up. I think the show could run another 2 years or more easy if the cast remains willing to do it.

In two weeks the Animated version of Power of the Daleks, one of the missing Dr. Who episodes, introducing the 2nd doctor will premiere on BBC America. I’m anxious to see it but am surprised that it took nearly 30 years for the BBC to decide this is a good idea, although it is possible that they figured they didn’t want to go through the expense in case any of those episodes turned up. I suspect if the rating are good (and they will be) we will see the rest of the missing episodes done.

The Difference between a national story and a local story is illustrated in Minneapolis:

A woman was sexually assaulted by a group of four men and a teenager while walking along a south Minneapolis street Saturday evening, according to a safety advisory issued by Minneapolis police.

The victim was walking in the Lyndale neighborhood around 9 p.m. when a car full of men called her over to their vehicle. They spoke briefly and she continued walking, police said.

A short time later, the five men returned and approached her on foot. They forced the woman to go to an area near 32nd Street and Blaisdell Avenue S., where they sexually assaulted her, police said.

Now this is definitely a local story and not a national one, why because of this sentence

Police released the following descriptions for the five, all identified as Somalis, with dark complexions.

Yup nothing to see here USA move along.

Over at Stacy McCain’s site there is a story about another alleged rape:

Nor are people thinking about what they are doing in the real world in an age where everybody’s cellphone has a video camera, where anything a guy does in his dating relationships may become the subject of an online rant by an angry ex-girlfriend, where a guy meets a girl at a party and has what seems to him a consensual hookup only to discover, nearly two years later, that she’s telling the world that he’s a rapist.

But his main point is more cultural in terms of a warning to young men who do their thinking below the waist.

What you need me for is to explain the meaning of “crazy.” If a guy meets a girl at a party, how does he know if she’s crazy? Well, if he says “let’s go back to my place” and she says “yes,” that’s probably a sign she’s crazy. No sane girl would say yes to such an invitation. The dude might have herpes. He might be a rapist.

She barely knows this guy and she’s leaving the party with him? Crazy. Then she goes back to his place, goes to his bedroom, takes off all her clothes and thinks he’s not going to have sex with her? Crazy.

This is what I’ve explained to my sons. There is a direct correlation between (a) a woman’s willingness to engage in casual sex, and (b) a woman being crazy. As a general rule, the quicker she drops her pants, the crazier she is. Every guy is prone to believe that his own personal charm suffices to explain why this woman he just met is willing to leave the party with him for a quick hookup. “He shoots! He scores!”

Yeah, he’s a natural-born winner. The ladies can’t resist him.

That’s what he’s telling himself anyway, as he blazes past the flashing yellow lights and warning signs: “CAUTION: CRAZY WOMAN.”

The Greeks called it hubris, this arrogance that leads a man to destruction.

As a pair of them were leaving, both college age women they passed by me closes and shouted how they would be having a ton of abortions.

It occurs to me that these are the woman that the Pump and Dump crowd that Stacy McCain has referred to are counting on and in a very few years we might see one of them on feminist tumbler making the same charges that Rosie did.

The college Republicans were prohibited from filming the talk, and students were not allowed to ask Milo any questions verbally — they had to be scribbled on the back of index cards. Yiannopoulos was also prohibited from speaking to students one-on-one after the event and was escorted out of the building by campus officials as soon as his talk concluded.

After organizing the event, Ciccotta faced a backlash from Bucknell’s faculty. After suggesting, in a private meeting, that the event with Milo had been Bucknell’s “best ever,” he was told by the college’s Student Media Advisor that his attitude would “isolate” the people who worked under him at the college’s radio station.

He was later threatened with having his position as host of a political talk show on campus taken away over an alleged “conflict of interest.”

After all there is nothing worse than being a conservative.

There are very few things less surprising than conservatives being punished on campus for being conservative, this is one of them via the lonely conservative:

Good grief, thanks to Obamacare health insurance rates have been skyrocketing for years. Instead of leveling out, it’s only going to get worse. That’s coming from the woman who helped the implement the train wreck.

ObamaCare rates will skyrocket next year, according to its former chief. Enrollment is tumbling this year. And a big insurer is quitting most exchanges. That’s what we learned in just the past few days.

Marilyn Tavenner, CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans, revealed that she expects ObamaCare premium hikes “to be higher than we saw previous years,” including last year, which saw double-digit rate increases across the country.

Labor Markets: Hundreds of employees at the University of California at Berkeley are getting schooled in basic economics, as the $15 minimum wage just cost them their jobs. Too bad liberal elites “fighting for $15” don’t get it.

A week after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s $15 minimum wage boost into law, UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees announcing that 500 jobs were getting cut.

Glenn uses he word: Unexpectedly here I suspect that the same could be used to suggest that most of the leaders of those pushing for a $15 an hour minimum wage have positions that will never be lost because of the wage hike.

People have accused Curt Schilling of many things but there is one change that he have convicted himself out of his own mouth affairaphobic!

Speaking to Bannon, Schilling said, “I’m not transphobic, I’m not homophobic.” He added, “As long as you’re not sleeping with my wife, I don’t care who you sleep with.”

How DARE Curt Schilling advocating restricting the sexual freedom of people to exclude the choice of having sex with his wife on the trivial grounds that he’s married to her? But I’m not worried in a few years will have laws on the books that will protect the rights of people who wish to have sex with people outside of their marriage from financial penalties from angry spouses and anyone who things otherwise will be branded as a bigot by the media.

Finally there is an interesting debate at PJ Media concerning a parent who took her kids to Dairy Queen and then immediately threw away her kids ice cream when they failed to thank the person who gave it to them.

I think it’s the mother’s call here but I guarantee you there is a near 0% chance that they will neglect to say “Thank you” on their next ice cream run.

I started this post as “I was just thinking” but it’s actually indistinguishable from my old “under the fedora” column so we’ll call it that

The Rubio Campaign is having a lot of fun with the #rubiocrimespree tag, that demonstrates a wisdom in how to deal with the left.

The GOP should send American Bridge flowers because now every time someone asked them to comment on a story that comes from them they can answer: “Your asking me to comment on a story from the people who brought me the #rubiocrimespree?”

People give a lot of grief when Oliver Wills or Eric Boehlert when they say foolish things to defend the left or attack the right, but it should be remembered that this is what they were paid for.

Plus foolish tweets like this

will never stop being amazed at how many grown Twitter men Tweet abt Bill Clinton sex life….#issues

While it’s true that the use of the laws involving withdrawals to go after Denny Hastert is kinda iffy he should have known better to lie to the FBI, particularly given his past.

I keep hearing people making the arguments against Hillary Clinton however these arguments presume that people who support Hillary are doing so based on argument vs emotion. This is why you need a dynamic leader for the GOP who can both make the argument for his position and provide the emotional leadership to inspire those who aren’t paying attention.

I saw a poll recently saying republicans were only viewed favorable by 41% of the public. Given that the popular culture for decades has spent their time bashing the GOP that’s quite an accomplishment.

Those previous two statements explain why so much effort is made to elevate feelings over truth in our current culture.

Incidentally if you don’t believe me about what matters to voters consider. I made it a point to record the Q & A for all the various questions asked to Ted Cruz separately so that a person wanting to hear his answers on issues could see what he believes and judge accordingly. Yet every single on of those videos combined did not draw the number of hits that my friend Rob Eno’s clip of Cruz’s joke about Hillary framing Tom Brady did.

Rob’s deserves credit for recognizing that to the viewing public that joke was what mattered, but that doesn’t say much for the viewing public does it?

It’s kind of discouraging to see Pablo Sandoval playing so poorly for the Red Sox but given three world series in a decade I can’t find it in myself to complain that much.

This fellow doesn’t care much for the Catholic Church but that’s what the Perpetual Twitter Novena is for.

I must admit I have soft spot for people who use language well, even when it’s directed against things I hold dear.

I really think there are plenty of people on the left and not a few people on the right who are cheering for the jihadists to murder Pam Geller for the crime of speaking uncomfortable truths.

That’s really one of the advantages of being Israel, When you face destruction on a daily basis you don’t have the luxury of abandoning reality for comfortable fictions

It’s a pain in the neck to have to wait for the next season of Doctor Who and know that you only get 13 weeks of new episodes but when you think about it in the old days you had 26 weeks of episodes but they were all half the size of the current ones, and you had 6 stories vs the 10-12 we have each season, plus the Christmas special. In the end you are getting the same amount of Doctor Who in terms of minutes as in the old days, just compressed into fewer weeks while expanded into more stories.

Earlier this week I poked fun at the new cultural orders concerning Bruce Jenner (until he legally changes his name he’s Bruce) by pointing out that pretty soon Life of Brian will have to be censored to make it politically correct.

You could not make Monty Python today, not only would so few people get the literary and classical references but the army of the aggrieved would not allow the jokes, or they’d be beheaded.

Mel Brooks once commented he didn’t start making fun of Nazi’s until Hitler was dead and they were defeated, frankly if he was 35 instead of in his 80s I don’t think he could do what he did either.

It’s kind of odd to See Stacy McCain go almost all feminism all the time, but he’s made himself an expect and having done so is much like Jor-El when he’s figured out Krypton is going to blow up. He knows the danger and is doing his best to warn the rest of us before it’s too late.

Keep an eye on that meme because I’ll be using it for another post shortly.

One of the things that I’ve come to believe as I’ve gotten older is that God is no less active in our modern day that he was 200, or 500, or 1000 or 3000 years ago in his interactions with humanity. I think we’ve just done our best to train ourselves not to hear him, with an awful lot of help from the other side of course.

Elizabeth Price Foley is now a regular contributor to Instapundit, Given the amount of time Glenn has given the site over the years it makes sense that he now has someone to share the load, and he’s still putting up an ungodly amount of posts compared to normal human beings.

I’ve really fallen in love with the Movie Pimpernel Smith. I’ve only ever seen it on youtube but I suspect it will be years before I’m tired of it.

Ever notice that neither Amazon Prime nor Netflix seems to have the classic movies of Errol Flynn available for free? The reality is most of the stuff that is available is stuff that you can’t effectively sell.

Let’s not forget they are no more in the charity business than I am.

Finally in closing let me remind all of you who are feeling discouraged that are discouraged about the state of te country and the state of the world that t many in the world the Soviet Union’s success and the United State’s failure was a done deal…right up until the moment it wasn’t.

Oh and if you’re free Wednesday you should go see Evan Sayet in Boston, I am.

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We need to encourage every single Islamist in the world to migrate to Syria & Iraq to join up with ISIS. The better to kill them all.

Have you noticed that the same polsand their allies who insist ISIS and their 30k+ soldiers don’t’ represent Islam have absolutely no problem using the 40 person strong Westboro Baptist Church to represent all of Christianity?

If time lords were real they would use Steven Moffat’s episodes of Doctor Who in class to justify their non-intervention policy.

the surest way to know that something is not a “grass roots” movement is to hear a national democrat call a movement one.

Since ISIS has some cultural westerners in their ranks you would think that someone would be bright enough to tell them they beheading Americans on video is just the type of thing that can get even a society that has lapsed as far as ours to attack them.

Last week the EDL & others marched in Rotherham over the rape and assault of 1400+ children over 17 years by largely Pakistani Muslim perps, quite a few people on the left & with Labour (think English Democrats) cried “Racism” at this march. Maybe it’s just me but if you have a group of men of a particular race who are sexually assaulting a group of youth of a different race wouldn’t that by definition be an act of racism?

There is a news report that many Chinese & Japanese consider a war against each other “inevitable” Given Japan’s birth rate If I was China I’d just wait a generation or two and walk into an empty country.

I was Watching the movie Captain Blood the first pairing of Errol Flynn & Olivia De Havilland yesterday. That movie is 79 years old yet really holds up well today. Olivia De Havilland the female lead and one of the most beautiful women who ever lived is still alive today at the age of 98, She was only 19 when that picture was made but given her poise and bearing you would never know it.

One can not imagine Olivia De Havilland storing nudes of herself on her home computer.

Remember actors are paid to play make-believe to entertain the people who do the actual work of building, thinking and doing.

Football is having a hard time I suspect it’s popularity isn’t so much for the game but a by-product of the hype around it.

According to Birnbaum (Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream), SodaStream is the “largest employer of Palestinian people in the world outside of the Palestinian Authority.”

“We employ 500 Palestinians here. Side by side, we have 350 Israeli Arabs and another 300 Israeli Jews. And we get along together. They’re not killing each other! They go to lunch break. We break bread together and we get to know each other,” he said.

SodaStream pays Israeli wages — four times what workers would earn in the Palestinian Authority, where unemployment is 30 percent. And the workers say they’re happy, too.

Why deal with reality when one can feel good about one’s self by ignoring it?

I want to close with the Adrian Peterson story Looking at it I can’t help but think that society would like to have all the generation from the “greatest” and before branded as barbarians. I suspect if the generation of Americans who fought world war two was raised in as children are today Germany would have won the war.

Press and social-media hysteria is the problem, not the solution. But our nation is largely run by emotional children these days. Perhaps they should have been spanked when they were younger, instead of being constantly told how special they were.

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It’s been a while since I’ve done an Under the Fedora, a brain dump, I think it’s time.

Today marks the 30th day since I came back from my religious retreat at Casa Maria in Alabama. It had a profound effect on me and has led to positive changes in my personal and prayer life.

Some day I might tell you how profound but I suspect that post if it ever goes up, will be scheduled for after my death. I’ll have to remember to allow open comments on that one since I won’t be around to approve them.

Yesterday we had Dominic Nanni in the liberal chair on DaTechGuy on DaRadio. The more he comes on the more reasonable he tends to become. I still think of him as Jay Nordlinger, he started out as a big liberal from Michigan too and is now one of the best conservatives writers there is.

He “had a hard time squaring the circle of “There is no scandal in the IRS and the destruction of the hard drives by the agency, that doesn’t surprise me, Dominic strikes me as an honest man and dealing with blatant lies from your allies are always hard for honest men.

We have two priests at our parish and our losing both in the next 10 days.

Our associate pastor Fr Edwin (Center) who has been with us 3 years is leaving today for Columbia and when he comes back next week will be transferred to Athol where he will be handling 3 small churches.

He was the first priest assigned permanently to my parish younger than me in my lifetime, our new pastor will be our second. I’m going to have to get used to that because at 51 it won’t be the last.

Fr Bob leaves next week, he has been with the Parish for 14 years and will be leaving for St. Cecelia’s parish in Leominster. I envy them hearing his sermons for the first time. Not only are they some of the best and most intelligent I’ve ever heard but his sermons at daily mass are even better, those are never longer than five sentences long and say all that needs to be said.

Ironically he is going to the parish where I have my confession heard on my way home from the radio show (my own parish has confession just as my show starts) so I’ll be “seeing” him regularly.

As a rule Catholic priests are assigned seven years with a possible extension for an additional seven. I think this is a fine thing, for three reasons.

It keeps parishes from creating a cult of personality. It makes sure everyone gets a shot at the best priests And it keeps the perspectives fresh.

Since the readings at a Catholic church rotate on the three-year cycle that means other than during Easter Week, odds are you won’t hear the same sermon more than three times in a seven years cycle (or 4 times at daily mass with the 2 year cycle)

I mentioned Dominic Nanni, on the panel with him was Rob Eno of Red Mass Group. We were both on a panel of the Worcester Tea party last Thursday at the Canal restaurant on Water Street Worcester.

I tend to clash with a lot of people on twitter, one of them is Mr. Woosta who the night of hat event tweeted this:

I laugh when I see this, the Worcester Tea Party, like every tea party event I’ve ever attended event was open to anyone, with videotaping allowed. It would be very easy to come in and record “hate” if it was there.

But it’s much easier to simply proclaim it in the hope that people won’t ever bother to look.

Speaking of the Worcester Tea Party event I was slightly impolite, I was engaged in a debate with a very anti catholic woman (of course you never know if a person is actually a woman or man online) concerning a church “scandal” involving a convent in Ireland back 60-90 years ago. She was still pushing a meme that had been refuted in subsequent articles by the Irish times , and I kept tweeting those subsequent articles to her, she then said this

On a related note my sons were telling me on a roadtrip to the pheasant lane mall where one of the two Chick-Fil-A’s in New England is located one of their 20-year-old friends claimed that they “don’t hire or serve gay people”.

Both of my sons knew this was false, yet they didn’t want to bother to get into the debate.

That is how incidentally we lose the culture wars. By not standing up to blatant falsehood stand without challenge. When this stuff is not challenged it spreads. This is by design our foes want to tire us mentally.

Ironically I sent out a blast to past tipjar hitters of under $100 (my thanks as they allowed us to make our monthly goal for the first time since January). In addition to their financial support I asked them to critique the site as traffic has been down. The most common answer was they had stopped reading not because they didn’t like what they saw, but they were simply exhausted by the scandals of this administration & needed to step away.

That is by design.

Speaking of Chicken did you see my post on making my first homemade Curry. It’s here along with the recipe and seven videos on how it was done.

I’ll be making another one this week, it will be a lot easier as I won’t be holding a monopod while I cook.

I mentioned that traffic is down, I’ve been down quite a bit, mostly due to the lack of Instalanches. for a two year period I was averaging 1 a week, I’ve had two in the last five months.

Somewhere Charles Johnson is smiling as I teased him on this subject in the past but it’s been a good lesson. There is no divine right to an instalanche and it’s been a good lesson to learn.

(I’ll still keep sending Glenn the links, like prayer it helps to be persistent)

Speaking of persistence I’ve also been persistently clashing on twitter with someone called “Cool ca kind” who constantly tweets out old stats on the Church (Gay) Pedophile scandal.

The Kid leaves out the gay part although the stats are 78% of the assaults were men on boys. The media’s ability to avoid that part of he story has been a triumph but the most interesting thing about this “kid” on twitter is he simply repeats the same verse in Matthew over and over ignoring the rest of scripture in the attempt to paint the church as a Pedophile cult, it reminded me of C.S. Lewis in Screwtape who talked about a priest who had abandoned the Lectionary so that all his teachings came from the same 12 verses so there was little chance of his flock hearing anything new. That’s the rut Cool CA kid is in.

That’s why the three-year cycle is so good.

Finally I’ve been watching the World Cup and I think I’ve finally developed an appreciation for the game.

The trick, Soccer is all about anticipation. getting to not where the ball is but where it’s going to be. That’s makes it a mental game and I love thinking games.

One of the characteristics of Arab democracy, Islamic or no , has been danger to the Christian community. Christians have been fleeing for their lives in droves. This has produced an interesting side effect in Israel, Christian Arabs openly and proudly joining the Israeli defense forces:

Khaloul said that until now, many in the community had been too afraid to speak out, but that was going to change. Many are now even referring to themselves openly as “Israeli Christians.”

Ali, an organizer for the forum, noted that local Arabs see what is happening across the Middle East and realize that Israel is the only place in the region where Christians can feel safe and belong. “That’s why more and more of us are realizing that there is no other country here that is worth fighting for,” he added.

Arab Christians have resisted siding with Israel for three generations. It really speaks to the current crop of Islamists that they could produce such a result.

You can find the whole thing here and check it out on all those sites each week.

It hits me that a lot of you might not be familiar with the column so this week I’m posting it here a day after it appears on the net elsewhere.

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The Debate is still going on about the “causes” of the Boston attacks but at the UN there is someone who knows what’s going on :

UN Human Rights Council “expert” Richard Falk has published a statement saying Bostonians got what they deserved in last week’s terror attack. He quotes W.H. Auden to make his point: “to whom evil is done/do evil in return.”

Richard Falk is the UN’s “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” He has held the post since 2008, despite exposure as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist.

Falk is a big believer in “human rights”, who called the Ayatollah Khomeini a liberator. He blames Islamofacist terror on the fact that much of Islam “finds itself under the heels of U.S. economic, military, cultural, and diplomatic power.” (Well at least that is cleared up). Falk is also a member of a lawyers organization that the CIA once called a “front” for the Soviet Union and just like Rosie O’Donnell is a member of groups who are still waiting for the “real” story of 9/11.

Me I think if this is all the US’s fault, and the Palestinians believe this, after all their special rapporteur is saying this publicly, they certainly don’t want any of our dirty money. In fact if the UN feels the same, we should be duty bound to keep the cash so they aren’t contaminated by it.

It’s a big sacrifice but we’ll do it for them.

We are still hearing about the Poem for Dzhokhar from the once completely unknown Amander Plummer. People are outraged over empathy for the bomber.

I’ve read the poem, I think the only connection to the bomber is the title. I think this woman was looking for attention and suckered a lot of people into giving it to her.

Welcome to the world of Twitter.

Yesterday the AP was hacked and a fake headline stating a bombing took place at the White House injuring the president was tweeted out. This confirms a basic lesson that is the same anywhere. Your passwords are only as secure as the most careless person who knows them.

The stock market briefly tanked before this was caught. I’ve never understood this, let’s say this was true, who calls their broker in a panic saying: The White House has been bombed! Sell 10,000 shares of Gerber baby foods!

Iraq carried out its first election since the U.S. military withdrawal without major bloodshed on Saturday in a major test for Iraqi security forces as they face a reviving al-Qaida insurgency.

Granted there has been a lot of stuff in the news this last week but I’d think the first election in Iraq without us going without a hitch is a big deal.

If Iraq continues to normalize it will continue to be a non-story, after all who wants to blame George Bush for a successful state as opposed to a basket case like Egypt?

Bush is clearly the best president of the 21st century, granted there are only two choices unless you count Bill Clinton’s 19 lame duck days. I suspect as time passes he will be harder to dislodge that people think.

Marcum has said that he was arrested on charges of disrupting an educational process and obstructing an officer, though White said Monday that the Logan County prosecutor’s office is reviewing the case to decide whether to proceed.

Marcum wore the same shirt to school Monday. It displays the NRA logo and a hunting rifle.

Other students across Logan County wore similar shirts, which display the NRA logo and a hunting rifle, to school in a show of support for 14-year-old Jared Marcum, said his lawyer Ben White.

This is exactly how you deal with this kind of thing. As a British Admiral named Blake once said: “Cringing to these fellows will never do.”

There are two sex scandal stories out there this week the first has a political angle:

According to the affidavit, from May 2012 through February 2013, Adam Paul Savader sent anonymous text messages using Google Voice numbers to 15 women stating that he had nude photographs of the women and threatening to distribute the nude photographs to the women’s friends and family members unless the women sent him more nude photographs of themselves. Savader sent some of the victims links to a photo-sharing website where nude pictures of the victims had been posted.

This guy is a former intern to Paul Ryan, personally I wouldn’t have thought people would have fallen for this but apparently this stuff is more common than you think.

There is a lesson here about the perils of the digital age: Anything you put on the Web — even uploaded to private accounts — can be accessed, if someone with enough skills really wants to get to it bad enough. And naked pictures? Yeah, don’t do those. Ever. Because that boyfriend you’re sending them to may not be your boyfriend forever.

The woman shown having sex with a Buddhist monk in a video recently circulated in the Cambodian community has filed a civil lawsuit against five individuals she alleges illegally distributed the tape.

Taping of the voice and actions of a private person without permission in Massachusetts and distributing them is illegal, which Maya Men highlights in her suit.

Among those Men has sued following the release of the tape of her sexually engaging with the Venerable Nhem Kimteng are another local monk and a former member of the executive committee for the $10 million Lowell temple project Men is helping lead.

Kimteng and Men were filmed in the Trairatanaram Temple in North Chelmsford.

Why do I have the feeling that if this involved a Catholic Priests instead of Buddhist monks it would be a front page headline in the Globe and all over the MSM?

Some sports? Remember before the Baseball season began everyone was picking the Redsox & Yankees to finish 4th & 5th in the AL East? As of this morning The Red Sox are in a 1st place tie & the Yankees are a whole ½ game out.

As they say, that’s why they actually play the games.

I’m still not used to the Houston Astros in the AL but I’m sure the 4 other teams in the AL West currently ahead of them are happy to see them there.

This is THE best time of the year for sports, Baseball, Hockey & Basketball all being played at once. One might make the point that Nov & Dec you have three major sports played at once too but if one of them isn’t Baseball it doesn’t count.

I’ve talked about the number of Electoral votes Massachusetts has lost in my lifetime (5) if you want to get a good idea where all those votes went, check the attendance figures when the Red Sox come to town when they play in Red States.

People say: Don’t you wish New England folk would elect more conservatives, I answer New England folk DO, we just do so in the states they’ve moved to.

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Watched High Noon Yesterday it really holds up over time and the cast is simply out of this world. While Gary Cooper & Grace Kelly get top billing to me the most interesting moments are the scenes between Lloyd Bridges & Katy Jurado.

Until I looked it up I would have never known that Juardo was only 28 at the time. She carries herself much older and you would never guess Lloyd Bridges was a full 9 years older than her.

Movies are all about the art of illusion.

Shakespeare’s birthday was this week. It’s become fashionable to devalue his plays but let’s face it, how many playwrights still have their plays performed regularly 400+ years after their birth. In fact I don’t think you can find a day in the last 50 years when a play of Shakespeare was not performed in some theater somewhere in the world.

That’s immortality!

Finally This week’s is the 4th of the Doctor Who 50th anniversary specials on BBC America. The subject is 4th Doctor Tom Baker the Doctor Who most familiar to Americans before the revival of the series.

Tom Baker’s complete with 12’-18’ scarf is THE definitive Doctor. He held the role for 7 years got the show it’s best ratings and is regularly voted the best Doctor ever by the fans (losing only a few time in the last 30 years).

37 years ago I accidentally discovered the show and him on Channel 12 Rhode Island on a Saturday afternoon and have been hooked ever since. In 1981 I got my first credit card in college and used it to buy a VCR for $500, as much as a semester of college at the time, to tape the show regularly off of public TV. I still have the tapes and on occasion my sons & I watch them together on a $20 VCR.

If you watch only one of the specials, watch this one.

If you liked Under the Fedora make sure you check out those sites that carry it.

As I’m typing this Chris Dorner has apparently been killed by police but not before he took hostages and killed one officer and wounded another.

The celebration of Dorner based no race and ideology has been one of the more disgusting things I’ve seen. It is in my opinion symbolic of a portion of society where fatherhood is a rare thing but even with that rationalization it’s still a shock, but it shouldn’t be after all there are those who celebrated Charles Manson, but there was a time before the net that people would be ashamed to celebrate evil publicly.

Welcome to post Christian America.

I ran a little late with the column but if I had run slightly later I could have included this bit from Michelle Lancaster:

As the Astros were once the Colt 45’s

it makes perfect sense but I’ll bet real money the Media does it’s best to try to cancel this event or at least turn it into a giant protest.

Musial never dated movie stars, he wasn’t known for fights with the press, brawls in bars, or bad behavior of any time. He was married for 72 years to the same woman who died last May and was never known to mistreat anyone expect opposing pitchers whose offering he deposited all over the field or over the fence from 1940 till 1962.

Musial won 3 MVP and was runner up 4 times. Think of that a second, for one third of his career it was the consensus that he was the best or second best at what he did in the league.

In interviews after the event Hughes and Green talked about reaching out to the Tea Party, Liberty (Ron Paul) people and the unenrolled. My impression from people in the room suggests Tom Green strength is from the Tea Party while Hughes has support from party regulars.

But the real question to be answered is: What do the state committee people who are the only ones who have a vote in this election think? The answer to that question which will determine if the GOP rises again in Massachusetts…

…and that will make all the difference.

If there is one thing we need in the Massachusetts GOP it’s a new road.

So check out both the Examiner piece or Under the Fedora at any of the Five blogs that carry it every week.

Hagel gives Obama the cover to do the things he really wants to do but didn’t dare say it aloud.

I don’t want to hear a single complaint from any Jewish person who voted for the president. 20 years ago there might have been an excuse for not knowing but in this internet age the only reason to be ignorant of what was coming was to choose to be so.

and on College Football & Catholics

I don’t follow college football, but I really have to laugh when I saw my fellow Catholics going nuts over Notre Dame vs Alabama. A lot of folks were upset when they were crushed by the tide.

I wonder how many of these Catholics were outraged by Obama as the Commencement speaker or by big contributors to Emily’s (Abortion) list on the board?

Where your treasure is that’s where your heart will be.

Speaking of where your treasure and heart is, Stacy McCain’s treasure and heart are currently in training at Ft. Meade. If you don’t understand what that means he explains it:

While we were in the Ceremony Room where the swearing-in took place, I read a plaque on the wall. The plaque explained that the room was dedicated to the memory of Marine Corporal Jennifer M. Parcell, who had sworn in there two days after her 18th birthday in 2004.

In October 2006, Corporal Parcell was deployed to Iraq and assigned to the 1st Combat Logistics Group. She volunteered to search female Iraqi citizens at a checkpoint in Al Anbar Province, and was killed in an attack by a female suicide bomber on Feb. 7, 2007.

Corporal Parcell was 20 years old when she died — the same age as my son on the day he enlisted in the Army. Think about that.

Today we have an all volunteer army. Neither of my sons have chosen (so far) to serve. The reason why they have that choice is because one of Stacy McCain’s sons have.

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

That is not an misprint, it is not a phony site, this was the statement put out.

As I watched last night all I could think of was Jimmy Carter. Ironically the same day that Greg Sargant insisted this was not 1980 our embassies are attacked, but that’s unfair to Carter, his first reaction was not to defend the Iranians who hit our embassy.

"The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind."

Note that Mrs. Clinton’s first words were not for the Attacked Americans, the burned embassy, it was for the religious sensibilities of the attackers.

“While the responsibility for our lack of credibility in the greater middle east rests with Obama, let’s not forget that our middle east foreign policy is the product of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and others who share their views. These past four years do not reflect well upon their judgment: something to bear in mind when talk of a Hillary Clinton presidency arises.”

My reaction to the embassy statement frankly is not printable, But Mitt Romney is a much more measured man that is he had this to say:.

“I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi,” the statement read. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

And the media response to this has been united, loud and decisive, to condemn pillory and attack….Mitt Romney for his inflammatory statements: such as this headline from Salon:

MSNBC has been unrelenting attacking Mitt Romney panel after panel condemning Mitt & Bibi Netanyahu but hasn’t had much to say about the embassy statement, like the killing of the Copts and the burning of their churches as far as MSNBC and our friends on the left are concerned it’s never happened. Or It’s not newsworthy.

As I watched it this Morning I was in complete disbelief.

These people have no idea, no understanding at all. This is their world view, that Israel is the enemy, in their world Islam has to be appeased, that Mitt Romney not those who have attacked our people are the enemy that HAS to be stopped.

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The title of this piece is Frenchie , Rooster and Lt. Data & Sherman. That is because when I look at what has happened it reminds me of three movie/TV moments.

In the Movie 1943 Sahara a small contingent of British, French, Australians & Americans find themselves untilled in the Egyptian desert in 1942. Earlier in the movie when a Nazi flyer is shot down the Frenchman offers to take him behind a dune, when the others object he says they don't understand:

“This is a Nazi”.

They ignore him, later in the movie when the small band is in a fight with hundreds of Germans. Under a flag of truce Frenchie is sent to talk to the German commander, as he returns is shot in the back. The British Officer too late gets it saying:

“Frenchie was right, we don’t’ understand the Nazis”

When I look at our reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood this is what I see.

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On the TV show Star Trek the Next Generation there is an episode called: "The Most Toys" where an eccentric named Kivas kidnaps Lt. Cmdr Data to add to his collection. He continually threatens the life of a woman who has served him to keep Data in check and when they both try to escape he slaughters her with a weapon that produces violent painful death.

When Data picks up the blaster and orders his surrender his captor notes Data can not kill and threatens says the following:

“You will entertain me and you will entertain my guests if you don’t I’ll kill someone else, him perhaps, it doesn’t matter, his blood will be on your hands just like Varia”

Data the android without feelings finally concludes “I cannot allow this to continue.” And just as he is about to fire he is transported out

When I see the repeated deaths, and attacks by radical Islam, I wonder when we will say what Data does.

————————

The final quote come from the movie True Grit. Here is a short clip of the scene where he after talking to a rat telling it to stop, John Wayne in his Academy award willing roll as Rooster Cogburn acts.

after Mattie puts the rat out Rooster turns to her and says

“You can’t serve papers on a rat baby sister you have to kill him or let it be”

The full clip is here

This is the reality of radical Islam. For years we have been warning about Islamic Terror, for a long time we’ve warned about the Muslim Brotherhood. I’ve maintained that Libya & Egypt both have the right to the government they wish, but with those rights come responsilities. Yet our friends on the left are convinced that we can talk our way out of this, that if only we are nicer and more submissive they will be come our friends. This is not only a delusion it is a delusion that is fatal

"We cannot change the hearts of those people of the South, but we can make war so terrible…that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.".

And I will say out loud what nobody else wants to. We can not change Islamists hearts we can not make the love us unless we abandon free speech and the principles we hold dear. We can not change these people unless we submit and we are fools to try to do so. All we can do is make them fear us, all we can do is make them understand that any such attack, any such action will produce a response so massive so horrible and so unrelenting that generations will pass before they consider striking again.

Remember It wasn’t diplomacy or even the impending invasion of Japan and the potential of millions of deaths fighting us that ended World war two, it was two atomic bombs.

The general reception to these repeated declarations of the weakness of the Obama message, the sight of democrat after democrat running from Obama and repeated electoral defeats for the left have been a level of disbelief and skepticism from my fellow conservatives tinged with a degree of fatalism so large that I thought I was talking with Red Sox Fans circa 2003.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) June energy report says that energy-related carbon dioxide fell to 5,473 million metric tons (MMT) in 2011.

That’s down from a high of 6,020 MMT in 2007, and only a little above 1995′s level of 5,314 MMT.

Better yet, emissions in the first quarter of 2012 fell at an even faster rate — down 7.5% from the first quarter of 2011 and 8.5% from the same time in 2010. If the rest of 2012 follows its first-quarter trend, we may see total energy-related carbon dioxide emissions drop to early-1990s levels.

Wow. Victory for the enviro crowd, yes? Regulation has succeeded, right? The government has turned the tide?

Nope. In fact it has nothing to do with the enviro crowd, government or regulation.

Two dirty words: Hydraulic fracking. Two more for good measure: Natural gas. And the dirtiest word of all: Markets.

The top tax rate under Jimmy Carter was 70 percent. Obama says we need more money from the rich (increase taxes) so we can spur economic growth. Then why did we have the recession under Jimmy Carter (the top tax rate was 70 percent)?

Check out all three sites and if you want your web site to carry Under the Fedora, give me a shout

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The DaTechGuy Fundraiser continues and we are still under 30% of our $3000 goal.

For details click here for the progress check the thermometer to the right and to kick in hit DaTipJar”.

There was a time when such stories and columns would be consigned to the pages of magazines that would never been seen by the public. Unfortunately for our friends on the left, in the internet age these facts are easily accessible to the masses

Speaking of Wal-Mart, there was an article in The New York Times about online prostitution that recounted a simply horrible story:

She was sold to johns seven days a week, 365 days a year. After a couple of years, she fled, but a pimp tracked her down and — with the women he controlled — beat and stomped Alissa, breaking her jaw and several ribs, she said. That led her to cooperate with the police.

It took some time before they reached that point:

“He would get aggressive and strangle me and physically assault me and threaten to sell me to someone that was more violent than him, which he eventually did,” Alissa recalled. She said she was sold from one pimp to another several times, for roughly $10,000 each time.

That sure sounds like slavery to me.

How was this handled? Why, she was sold off a site called Backpage, owned by the Village Voice, a liberal bastion supported by the anti-Wal-Mart crowd, as Alissa put it:

“You can’t buy a child at Wal-Mart, can you?” she asked me. “No, but you can go to Backpage and buy me on Backpage.”

Go ahead and tell me again how unimportant social issues are to society. Nick Kristof, noting the furor over Rush Limbaugh, asks:

Isn’t it infinitely more insulting to provide a forum for the sale of women and girls?

I’m sure the liberal boycotts of the Village Voice—and Media Matters’ campaign to target their advertisers—will start any day now.

Sure it will.

Why do I get the feeling that this story got very little press because of the Village Voice/Rush Limbaugh juxtaposition?

The latest Under the Fedora Romney Bias and Courage is now up at The Minority Report and at the Conservatory. In addition to the topics mentioned in today’s column I finally tackle the issue that is apparently sweeping the country: Hayesgate!

One of my predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, reportedly said about the telephone, ‘It’s a great invention, but who would ever want to use one?’ That’s why he’s not on Mt. Rushmore, because he’s looking backwards. He’s not looking forwards.

That was too much even for The Washington Post:

Hayes, in fact, was such a technology buff that he installed the first telephone in the White House. A list of telephone subscribers published in the article “The Telephones Comes to Washington,” by Richard T. Loomis, shows that the White House was given the number “1.”

Now, for those on the left who might be upset at the Post for giving Obama “4 Pinocchios” on this: remember, it is perfectly safe for The Washington Post to defend Hayes. As a Republican who has been dead for over a century, he is no threat to Obama’s re-election campaign—and the Post did manage to slam the just-as-dead-but-still-hated Ronald Reagan in the same article, so that more than makes up for it.

Anyone who is surprised that the MSM found Obama’s gaffe on Hayes more newsworthy than the exchange on Sarah Palin simply isn’t paying attention.

Note that the Breitbartians list the “Top Ten Lies,” clearly implying that there are more. John Podhoretz discusses the way Palin is treated in the film:

“In this respect, Game Change handles Sarah Palin (Julianne Moore, blah) more charitably than you might expect. She is shown as a loving and caring mother with some kind of raw genius as a politician who is placed under almost unimaginable pressure at a moment’s notice when she is clearly unprepared for it. But in doing so, Strong and director Jay Roach exhibit not understanding but rather an almost excruciating condescension.”

It’s much like when people used to say that Willie Mays was a “great natural ballplayer”—which implied that a black man wouldn’t be a serious strategic student of the game. It’s not possible that a non-Ivy League person might be tactically more brilliant than they are—thus, their skill must constitute a kind of “raw genius.” This is why the Democrats keep playing the “quitter” nonsense—as if her resignation wasn’t one of the single most brilliant political moves she made.

I think the Democrats would have loved to have her tied down in Alaska, still serving a term, and unavailable to appear on television or campaign across the country for all kinds of candidates, as she does now.

Head on down to either spot and give it a read. And don’t forget the other great articles by other authors, for example a the Conservatory cities around the nation are finding that default isn’t just potentially for Greeks:

Oh yes, borrowing money from the pension fund to make “contributions” to the pension fund. Reminds me of spending all those Social Security “contributions” on current political desires, and stuffing the Trust Fund with IOUs. I tried something like that when I was younger. Spent about $100 on Magic cards and put a note saying: “I owe me $100″ in my wallet. That IOU was totally an asset!

Oh right. . . . I was a young idiot. So, what is the excuse of the various people involved in such shenanigans as pension obligation bonds, contribution holidays, etc.? I assume they were older than 19.

California is in a bad position. And so is New Jersey. And Illinois. And countless other government groups.

While at the Minority Report our friends on the left display a selective compassion for the poor:

I mean, these people on Maher’s panel were given so much (looks, wealth, fame, power) and they then decide to pick on the powerless and the toothless?! That is not good satire–any great satirist, like say Oscar Wilde, knows to only pick on the powerful. This is just pure meanness.

I’ve just finished watching The Doctor Who Christmas special. All day BBC America is showed a marathon but interrupted it for the Queen’s annual Christmas message. Not being a British subject I’d never heard one before today .

I have a soft spot for Queen Elizabeth, she is a stalwart friend of the United States, and the last link to the days when Britain was truly great. I have a horrible feeling that when she dies the best part of England will die with her.

The Greater Boston Tea Party has elected Christine Morabito to serve as president of the non-profit, all-volunteer policy advocacy organization. Ms. Morabito, whose two-year term commences January 1, 2012, replaces Christen Varley, who served as the first president. Both are counted among founders of the organization.

And if you want a little culture wars, the Third part of my series at Ladd Ehlinger’s place on Cinema and the Culture wars is up and running. I deal with the Movie: Oh God and you might be surprised which side of the culture wars I think it’s on:

It’s a feel good movie all around. The performances are excellent, John Denver is totally believable as Jerry Landers, helped by a good performance by Teri Garr as his wife and a cast chock full of some of the best character actors out there from William Daniels, to Jeff Corey and Ralph Bellamy. Add two actors who were yet to have their greatest impact–Paul Sorvino and David Ogden Stiers, punctuated of course by George Burns, who carries off the role with perfect timing and style. What’s there not to like about this movie? You have a nice conservative message about an unbeliever who hears the word of God and follows it, an affirmation of the importance of following God’s word no matter what, and the message that following God is not without cost.

If you look deeper, however, you will find some interesting messages hidden delivered with such skill that you might miss it, if you didn’t look.

Like this:

Listen to your Granny

Food Glorious Food

Find Discounts at the Stores you Love

Bloggers Prayer

Oh God, you who gave free will to your creation, bless those who use that precious gift to blog.

May we though this gift of freedom of expression enlighten, entertain and inform our readers, and we ask particular blessing for those who bring your word across the net, that they may faithfully execute your command to make disciples of all nations.